new topic creation

[tford]

I work in an org where most discussion threads start out in e-mail. Some are worthy of keeping and extending in a forum. A great feature would be to be able to paste in an e-mail discussion thread to create a topic. The thread would be parsed to create a topic and pre-populate posts under the topic with the replies in the e-mail thread. users would need to be identified per post. Ideally this would work with LDAP.

[EXreaction]

Other than posting the entire discussion in the first post and creating a new topic that way, I am not sure that something like this would ever come standard in phpBB. It may be a good idea for a modification though.

[naderman]

Other than posting the entire discussion in the first post and creating a new topic that way, I am not sure that something like this would ever come standard in phpBB. It may be a good idea for a modification though.

Would you mind explaining why you think so?

[mtotheikle]

E-mail based topics would be very interesting and useful say if an admin needs to create a post about something regarding the site but can not access a computer. There would have to be some sort of auth system for this, but a very interesting idea. I know Wordpress has a feature like this for creating posts which comes in very handy for some people.

[EXreaction]

I do really like the idea and would think that quite a few would find it useful as a plugin, but I don't think it would be useful enough to enough people that it would be worth developing and putting in the main release (basically another delay to 4.0 release to have it a standard feature).

Once 4.0 is finished it could be a feature to be added for 4.1, but the important thing now is to get the core out with the features most useful to the largest number of forum owners.

[Highway of Life]

Great idea! It has been a highly requested feature in my experience, there are many sites out there that just end up posting e-mail threaded discussions. DAWMac is a large music community that comes to mind. Many popular systems are incorporating some kind of e-mail input. Facebook and Flickr are a couple large systems that now use these kinds of features.

[igorw]

I don't see why the core architecture couldn't support a way of importing different data streams. This could be a simple interface to allow several implementations, like email, twitter, rss, etc.

[code reader]

I don't see why the core architecture couldn't support a way of importing different data streams. This could be a simple interface to allow several implementations, like email, twitter, rss, etc.

i don't think anyone argues otherwise.
this is generally referred to as "API".
any reasonable API should, for sure, include a method to create a new post, either as reply or new topic.

defining the API phpbb 4 should support is yet another unwritten RFC (hint, hint).

it's also reasonable, IMO, that the actual implementation of a mail-client that will use this API to implement mailing-list linkage should be left out of the core.

peace.